Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum is a museum founded in 1996 in Mountain View, Santa Clara County in the U.S. state of California, the preservation and presentation of the IT history is dedicated to. It houses one of the world's largest collections of computers.
History
Gordon Bell founded in 1979 with the financial support of the DEC Digital Computer Museum. In September 1979, the museum was opened in Camden.
1983, the name was changed to The Computer Museum and planned a move to Boston. November 13, 1984, the museum moved into a former warehouse that was shared with The Children 's Museum of Boston. The acronym was coined TCM common for both.
The Computer Museum History Center was established in 1996 as a branch in Mountain View in Silicon Valley and the barracks of the former furniture warehouse of the Naval Station Moffett Field served as the first site. As a work order was collecting artifacts and historical data on site for the museum.
The Computer Museum in Boston was closed in 1999 and the Children's Museum took over the premises. The remaining there exhibits took over the Science Museum in Boston.
With the exception of a variety of exhibits to the robot collection, the Science Museum in 2000 handed over his computer collection to the Computer Museum History Center. She was transiently stored in the large airship hangar at Moffett Airfield.
2001, the name was changed to Computer History Center.
Through generous donations the former administration building was acquired by SGI in 2002. In June 2003, the company was incorporated in the new building with a temporary exhibition. For space reasons, only a few percent of the entire collection could be shown there; the rest was stored in warehouses in the area.
After a 19- million dollar and two-year renovation, the museum was expanded with the permanent exhibition Revolution: reopened The First 2000 Years of Computing in 2011.
2012 started the museum with the archiving of important software source code, starting with the programming language APL. In February 2013 Adobe Systems donated the Photoshop 1.0.1 source code for the collection, in November 2013, Apple Inc. Apple DOS source code of the Apple II on March 25, 2014 followed by MS- DOS 1.1, MS- DOS 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a, sponsored by Microsoft.
Collection
The collection consists of approximately 90,000 objects, films and photographs, as well as a variety of documents and digital data. Among the exhibits include rarities such as the Apple I, the Cray -1, Cray -2, the Cray -3 or the original Utah Teapot, Martin Newell served as a model for his 3D model, which is still a standard reference model for computer graphics is.
Cray -2
Utah Teapot
PCs from the 1970s and 1980s
Google Street View car
The Germany-based Heinz Nixdorf Museum Forum advertises as well as the Computer History Museum in order to be the largest computer museum in the world. Compared to the Heinz Nixdorf Museum Forum, which has a permanent exhibition area of 6,000 square meters, provides the Computer History Museum 's exhibits on a much smaller area of 2,300 square meters. The number of exhibits, however, the German Museum is well behind the U.S..
Computer History Museum Fellow Award
Since 1987 the museum placing the Computer History Museum Fellow Award. The winners are people who have made significant contributions to the advancement of computer technology. Each year, suggestions for possible candidates to be accepted by the public. This is to ensure that a wide variety of services for the award can be considered. The final selection is then a panel of historians, scientists, industry representatives and museum staff and previous winners. The first winner was the computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper. Other winners include, among others, Konrad Zuse, the inventor of the first computer, Steve Wozniak, who built the Apple I or Linus Torvalds, who wrote the Linux kernel.
See list of Fellows of the Computer History Museum.